Microsoft signs up with Facebook-founded Open Compute Project, contributes its server designs

Microsoft is joining the Open Compute Project, a Facebook-funded initiative which has its two-day long, fifth summit starting today. The software giant will be sharing its cloud server designs which are used on many of its services, including Windows Azure, Bing and Office 365.

Founded back in 2011 by the social juggernaut, the Open Compute Project features openly shared designs of data center products to make available cost effective and functional prototypes throughout the world. Microsoft is the latest firm to join this project.

Microsoft’s corporate vice president for cloud and enterprise, Bill Laing explained the services giant’s contribution to the OCP. “Microsoft and Facebook (the founder of OCP) are the only cloud service providers to publicly release these server specifications, and the depth of information Microsoft is sharing with OCP is unprecedented.”

Besides the cloud server designs, the Redmond tech company is also making available its system management source code. Additionally, the code has been made publicly available on GitHub today. “As part of this effort, Microsoft Open Technologies Inc. is open sourcing the software code we created for the management of hardware operations, such as server diagnostics, power supply and fan control. We would like to help build an open source software community within OCP as well.”, Laing added.